


and they're buying a stairway to heaven

by TheHiddenPassenger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Wendigo, fuck idk man I just started barfing words, maybe????, story with no direction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-02
Updated: 2016-08-02
Packaged: 2018-07-28 20:35:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7655803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHiddenPassenger/pseuds/TheHiddenPassenger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A typical hunt for the Winchesters, follow the signs, catch the case, analyze, hunt, kill, save. Easy, right? </p><p>Maybe not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and they're buying a stairway to heaven

**Author's Note:**

> I've got no idea where I'm going with this... This's my first SPN fic, though not my first IDEA for the show... but if anyone cared about that, season 11 might've ended differently, y'know what I mean? Anyway bear with me.... I've written most of this with my phone on google docs, with some lovely beta-ing from a buddy, so we'll see how it goes.

Sam stretched and groaned, arching his back and turning over to lie on his face. The pillows smelled funny, not dirty, just funny--used, maybe? Like they'd been cleaned a thousand and one times and the smell of overuse simply refused to evacuate. Febreeze wouldn't have done the trick, so he chose to focus on returning to slumber. The Winchesters so rarely got the chance to sleep for more than a couple hours at a time and so the brothers took what they could get.

 

Dean was snoring like a chainsaw, arm tossed up over his eyes, remaining hand covering his groin reflexively. It would have annoyed the younger Winchester, save for the simple fact that it meant his brother was getting some much-needed shut eye. He almost hoped they wouldn't find another case to go chasing after, another electric bunny for them, the eternally tenacious--if a bit dull--greyhounds. Sam pondered this analogy a moment and hated it even longer than he'd spent dreaming it up. It felt true, but at the same time horribly simplified. Maybe he was giving them too much credit, however. After all, as far as beating a dead horse went, the Winchester boys were a regular Bonnie and Clyde. Dean would have insisted he was Clyde, so Sam made a mental note to assign Bonnie to him, just for kicks. When did he get all this free time?

 

Since when was Sam Winchester allowed to lie in a motel bed, face stuffed in a pillow, thinking about anything other than a case, or some lore, or how royally screwed the world was based on the sole fact of his miserable excuse for existence? Best not to dwell on that last one. He rolled back onto his side, propping himself up on an elbow to watch Dean's chest rise and fall in cacophonous slumber. It was endearing, in its way and Sam's lips twitched upward at the corners. For a fleeting second, he nearly smiled.

 

Nearly.

 

Instead, he flipped over and faced the bathroom door, left ajar by whomever last used the space--to pee, brush his teeth, mess with his hair, what have you. It was one of those hollow core numbers, easy to put a boot through, or a whole body, if one had the strength. He reflected on how many times he'd been tossed through a door like that… how many instances in which a solid oak door--like in an old farm house--would have meant his own, bloody demise.

 

Suddenly, Sam found himself unable to force his busy mind back to sleep, the events of the past decade of his life replaying themselves behind heavy eyelids, a poor VHS copy of the vivid reality of his own past. But thank goodness for that separation, else he might have lost his mind by now. Did Dean wonder these things? Where were his thoughts at that moment? Did he think about Sam as often as Sam thought about him? The younger Winchester lay on his side a little longer wondering about this and otherwise until his brother began to stir. Presently, Dean came to with a snort and a grunt.

 

Sam sat up, stretched once more and stood, bleating a pained “good morning” between his brother's protesting attempts to sink back into oblivion. It reminded Sam of their childhood, begging their father for “just a few more minutes” and receiving no mercy.

 

Today, the sun was their enemy. Its sharp fingers stabbed in through the window which, incidentally, faced east. The curtains were not enough to diffuse the potency of rosy dawn’s demanding call to arms. The light caromed off any reflective surface it could find and inevitably located someone's eyes. Today, the victim was Dean Winchester, who blinked back tears from reddened, bleary eyeballs to ward off the pain of sudden penetration. The sound that escaped him was half whine, half growl.

 

Sam couldn't help laughing on his way to the bathroom. He heard a thud and the creak of old bed springs, glancing only once over his shoulder to witness the lump of blankets Dean had become. The younger brother shook his head, the ghost of a smile once more playing on thin lips as he grabbed a set of clean clothes from his duffel and disappeared behind the mint green, hollow core door. As soon as Sam was alone with his reflection, he regretted it. The incandescent light of the bathroom was doing nothing to help the man's complexion, or remedy the fact that he looked like death warmed over. A few more days of sleep might have aided this, but Sam suspected his weary spirit was too much for a motel bed to cure. He turned from the bloodshot green eyes in the marred mirror and stooped to switch the shower on, hot as it would go.

 

As the water began to run, Sam wondered how the mirror acquired such a mark and why it had not been replaced. The second question was not difficult to answer, given the caliber of the establishment. Anyway, why fix something that still worked? Sure, it was broken and sort of ugly, but a mirror’s job was to show someone their image, and it still did _that_. What more could anyone ask? Sam shucked his pants--he'd managed to at least discard his shirt before collapsing--and stepped under the scalding water. It made his skin prickle all over for a moment and he arched his back, hissing through his teeth.

 

“Sammy,” Dean grunted from the doorway, for a motel bathroom did not have a lock. Sam reflected that this was probably for the best.

 

“Yeah,” Sam called back out of courtesy. Dean knew where he was; he was merely alerting Sam to _his_ presence.

 

No other response was necessary as Dean entered the bathroom and mimicked Sam's earlier motion of staring himself down in the cracked mirror. The elder Winchester pressed his palms into his eyes until he saw stars and then ceased. He ran a hand over rough jaw, which was about the texture of sandpaper with its stubble and grunted, tugging disapprovingly at a bag which had settled itself under one eye. It's twin continued taunting Dean as he wrapped a fist around his toothbrush.

“We should hit a laundromat soon,” Sam said from the shower, his voice echoing off the tile walls. Dean's shirt was wrinkled and smelled of sweat and a little blood and his jeans probably felt like they had grown into his skin. The latter nodded, squeezing the last bit of life out of the spent bottle of minty fresh, generic brand paste onto his worn out toothbrush.

 

“Maybe a dollar store, too,” he garbled around the presence of the slender object between his sleep-swollen lips. Every once in a while, the boys ran out of basic, human supplies. In their fervor to save people and hunt things, they were rarely confronted so blatantly with their own humanity, their own base needs… with normalcy.

 

“Maybe you ought to make a list,” Sam suggested, then thought better of it, because if Dean was in charge of writing one, not only would it be nigh-unreadable, but Sam was fairly certain beer would be somewhere near the top and repeated several times down the line. They did not _need_ beer. “I'll make a list when I get out… has Cas contacted you recently?”

 

Sam wasn't sure why the trench coat-wearing angel leapt to mind so suddenly, but he had known himself long enough to realize that his instincts for that kind of thing were rarely mistaken. In fact, in their line of work, such instincts were often the difference between life and death.

 

“He ah… _texted_ two days ago,” responded Dean, spitting his toothpaste out and rinsing his mouth, examining his teeth in the mirror. Sam chuckled from the confines of the shower, switching the water off presently and sticking one long, corded arm out for a towel. Dean handed him a towel that hardly looked adequate to cover a child, but it was all they had.

 

“Add towels to the list,” he suggested, retreating from the bathroom so Sam could get out. It wasn't as though the Winchesters had never seen each other naked, they just didn't make a habit of it.

 

“Fluffy ones, right?” Sam guessed as he stepped out clutching the towel low on his hips. He knew Dean well enough to understand that beneath the machismo was a man who genuinely appreciated certain luxuries.

 

“Oh that is just _pathetic_ ,” Dean hissed, ignoring Sam's question in favor of gesturing fitfully at his towel. The bathroom door had not quite closed and the elder Winchester had been treated to something of a peep show.

 

“It's barely a washcloth,” Sam admitted, using his heel to shut the door behind him.

“Hurry up,” Dean warned. He was wrestling himself out of his shirt, sticking as it was to bruised, sweaty flesh. Once he had it peeled free, it found the floor and Dean sat himself back down on the bed closest to the bathroom, which happened to be Sam's.

 

The elder Winchester leaned back, propping himself on his hands and bawling raucously at Sam to “get pretty and get out.” His palms rested in warmth and Dean couldn't help but recall their days in crappy motels as kids. When it was cold, really and truly cold, Sam always found Dean's bed and curled up in his brother's arms. John wouldn't have approved of such behavior, would have seen it as weakness, very likely. But John was never there.

 

The phrase _‘loyal to an absent father’_ rang inside Dean's head, replaying in Gabriel's voice, but with a bit more venom. Or maybe it was the same amount of contemptuous acid, but with hindsight being what it was, Dean may have cut Gabriel some slack in his memories. In the end, the guy had been on _their_ side, after all. Sam emerged moments later, cutting Dean's thoughts short.

 

“All yours,” said the giant of a man, moving past his brother and settling down at the motel’s kitchenette table. He retrieved his laptop from a bag and immediately began scanning for cases, or anything that remotely resembled a case. Too much time between cases, as he'd discovered thanks to his earlier introspection, made idle hands and neither one of them had time to work for _that_ dick-in-the-box.

 

 _‘No rest for the wicked,’_ Dean thought wearily, dragging himself toward the bathroom with all the gusto of a deflated pool toy in October. He dug into his bag, swiftly snapping up a pair of jeans and and two shirts--one of them flannel--as was his custom. Cleanliness called to him and he obeyed.

 

The groan of the door closing on crappy hinges behind him echoed the groan that escaped his lips at the thought of a shower and maybe a beer. Dean tugged the shower curtain open and cranked the water hot, just as hot as Sam had set it. There was grease to wash away, mingled with old blood, not all of it human. He stood back and watched tje water run before beginning to work at his fly.

 

Peeling his jeans off became something of a chore after Dean realized that they, much like his shirt, had become encrusted with who knew what. Once he worked them over his butt, he shifted tactics and sat on the toilet to pull them the rest of the way off, grunting and complaining the entire time.

 

Outside, before his computer, Sam chose to ignore his brother's antics in favor of a particularly interesting news story originating out of…

 

“Wanna go back to Minnesota?” Sam shouted at the closed bathroom door. Dean heard him just fine as he stepped into the shower. A grunt was his only answer, so Sam continued.

 

“People keep disappearing off well-marked paths in the Chippewa national forest,” he said, standing and moving toward the bathroom door to be heard better over the roar of the shower water.

 

“I thought we were following bodies, not idiots who can't read signs,” Dean grunted, avoiding voicing what both Winchesters were thinking, that if it didn't lead to Amara, why bother?

 

“Saving people,” Sam reminded him, both of them, really.

 

“Right,” amended the elder. “Go on.”

 

“Okay, so evidently a couple of them were park Rangers, going out to find the other missing people...and so on,” Sam tilted his gaze up toward the door, as if Dean was standing there to meet him. They knew each other too well and Dean was staring at the door on his end where he knew Sam's eyes would be.

 

“Are you thinking wendigo?”

 

“Could be,” Sam responded, “I'll keep digging for more murders… if they fit the timeline…”

 

He trailed off, but Dean got the picture. Moments later, the shower turned off and soon after, Dean emerged, relatively satisfied with his appearance and ready for another case.

 

“So… mee-nah-soh-dah?” Dean chuckled, doing a bang up impression of Donna, their favorite Minnesotan sheriff.

 

“Yoo betcha,” Sam responded, snickering and closing his laptop. He stowed it and the boys were in the Impala and on the road within the hour. The engine roared happily, as if she was glad to be back out on the open highway. The sun hovered high in the sky, beaming down on them, as if the world wasn't going to hell in a hand cart--again. Far below, Dean fiddled with the radio a moment before Sam swatted his hand away and tossed in a tape.

 

“You still like Asia, right?”

  
“Always.”

**Author's Note:**

> I am TOTALLY open for suggestions, guys.


End file.
